By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 26, 2004

The first half of E. Elias Merhige's "Suspect Zero" plays like a compendium of serial-killer-detection movie cliches -- to the point that, with a few gags inserted, it could almost stand as a campy spoof: "National Lampoon Goes to the Crime Scene."

In the second half, the film takes an abrupt swing toward originality, and reveals its true premise and an occult element which has something to do with a top-secret FBI program using trained psychics to track down particularly elusive serial killers.

At this point, the film becomes much more interesting, but the relief comes much too late to save the day, the plot never builds any genuine suspense and Merhige batters our senses with so many visual non-sequiturs in every scene that the overall effect is brutalizing.

The hero is Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart), an FBI agent of considerable talent and zeal who's in disgrace for muffing a recent case by using illegal procedures, and has just been reassigned to a bureau office in the bush leagues of rural New Mexico.

Here, he's instantly drawn into a new spree of seemingly unrelated killings mostly involving middle-age men, which he soon discerns may be the work of a hypothetical superserial killer known to the bureau as "Suspect Zero."

When this shadowy character starts to take a personal interest in Mackelway and even begins to feed him clues to the murders, the stage is set for a creepy cat-and-mouse game very much (too much) in the spirit of "Silence of the Lambs."

As the game plays out, Eckhart manages to be a likable-enough focus, and he gets help from Carrie-Anne Moss as his former girlfriend agent conveniently called in from the old office for assistance, and from Ben Kingsley as a weirdo who may or may not be the title character.

But the film never generates any emotional investment in any of these characters or much interest from a succession of formulaic scenes spiked by razzle-dazzle effects that have no obvious purpose except to keep the audience from dozing off.

And when, in its eventful final act, Merhige ("Shadow of the Vampire") finally reveals what this thing is REALLY all about, it comes not with any blissful storytelling satisfaction but a grinding sense that this strange movie is a structural mess.